Jeremy Chapman
Jeremy Chapman is the mandolin player and tenor singer of the Chapmans, the family band he has played in since boyhood with his father, Bill, and his brothers John and Jason. The band was named Emerging Artist of the Year by the International Bluegrass Music Association in 2002. Since 2013 the three brothers have run The Acoustic Shoppe, a music store in Springfield, Missouri.
The family lived in Colorado, where his parents followed the Denver band Hot Rize and took their sons to bluegrass shows and the Rocky Mountain Bluegrass Festival. Bill Chapman had played organ and piano before he took up the banjo, John started on fiddle before switching to guitar, and their mother played bass. Jeremy began on mandolin at about nine, after finding the guitar too big for his hands. The Chapmans played their first show in April 1989 at the Bear Valley Inn in Colorado, and their first recording was made in the home studio of Bob Amos of Front Range.
In 1995 the family moved to the Missouri Ozarks, closer to the festivals east of there. In 1998 the band won the International Bluegrass Band Championship of the Society for the Preservation of Bluegrass Music in America, and that, with its independent album Love’s Gonna Live Here, led to a contract with Pinecastle. Jason took over the bass from their mother around the time of the first Pinecastle album, Notes from Home (1999), which was followed by Follow Me (2001); Ray Deaton of IIIrd Tyme Out produced both. Simple Man (2005), recorded in Nashville with Darrin Vincent producing, had Stuart Duncan on fiddle and Rob Ickes on dobro, as did the band’s first Compass Records album, Grown Up (A Revisionist History) (2010). The Chapmans have toured in Europe and played the Grand Ole Opry and the Ryman Auditorium.
Teaching lessons between tours led the brothers to open The Acoustic Shoppe in Springfield early in 2013, with their friend Gene Hoke as a partner. By 2021 Jeremy was teaching more than thirty students a week, the Chapmans had been producing a weekly television program, The Ozark Music Shoppe, on KOZL for several years, and they hosted the first Ozark Music Camp in Branson that October. The brothers taught all the members of the Petersens and played most of the instruments on that family band’s early albums; on Shenandoah (2017), produced by John and engineered by Bill, Jeremy played mandolin. In 2025 Hal Leonard published his instruction book Do-It-Yourself Mandolin.
